Best way to drag a shape over an object's surface in Maya
polycounter
I'd love to see if anyone has a better way of doing this. I always make a duplicate object of the shape I want to drag onto, and make it Live.
The drawback is that I have to be pretty specific of where I want to drag my shape over, or else the dragged shaped will eventually become too deformed. How do you guys do this, whenever you have to?
The drawback is that I have to be pretty specific of where I want to drag my shape over, or else the dragged shaped will eventually become too deformed. How do you guys do this, whenever you have to?
Replies
Most of Maya's Deformers use a duplicate BaseShape strategy to calculate deformation.
So, for instance if your sphere was a wrap you could slide across the surface by rotating the sphere's deform "baseShape" along with the explicit deform shape after impressing with deformation. ( transforming both the deformation with the baseShape allows the deformation to travel across the surface of the deformed object [ yer tri fan circle ] )
e.g.
like sliding muscle effects: ( wire deformer as an example )
or wave effects:
( from an old script that faked Mirai Magnet functionality with interactive deform setup in Maya before Maya had soft selection. ):
http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/clay_dough-mel
Transfer Attributes should not squish your verts around as you move your shape except in instances where you are trying to move your transferred object to a location that has no verts to reference. Of course, it always depends on the shapes.
Set Vertex position to On
Set Sample space to World
Set Search method to either option depending on needs/results.
Disable other options depending on your needs.
You can delete history and repeat Transfer Attributes as many times as you want. I recommend working from a copy in case something goes wrong.
@claydough Thanks for posting that method. I'm sure I must be doing something wrong, but are you sure that'd work in curve surfaces? It's fine and all when you can move the axis in XYZ, but when shaped are more complicated, I'd imagine that it could get harder to move around that bend/magnet...
go to bonus tools -> modify tabs -> snap align object to component
change the option at the option box. check orient and constraint
select first object you want to align and shift select component type (face) at second object.
sorry I should have been more explicit:
a deformer with a baseShape is not the same thing as a deformer with just a shape ( although u can sometimes get luck with similar effects on some )
deformers that use base shapes have two shapes and use the distance between the shapes to calculate deformation. But when we transform both of the dformers shapes at the same time we sweep that deformed distance across the deformed object.
none of the non linear deformers like the bend deformer have more than 1 shape to calculate deformation as far as I know. ( try wire and wrap )
the whole point is to remain perpendicular to the surface. Like a live surface. So on complex surfaces do just that! make yer deformed surface live and freely drag yer deformer( along with it's base shape )
I just sculpted a bird beak with convexity and concavity ( complex overlapping ) on a torus surface and am dragging it around the surface???
Edit: actually being live is not enough ( halfway though ) orientation does have to be constrained to a duplicate of the deformed surface. Need a script to automate?
Edit: depending on what yer usage is for such surface oriented sweeping on my muscle systems the deformers are set driven animated along motion paths along the surface.
@Mogul That looks sweet. However, in Maya 16 they've added the Snap Align to the Modify tab by default, and changed the options. Maya's documentation doesn't seem to have written about this particular function, would you care to explain in more detail how could one achieve that?
but my english is bad. so i will explain with some pic. hope you understand
English in yer pics seems fine to me! :thumbup: